[KenWittlief]

Depending on the engineering degree you are persuing, there are many college level engineering design contests / challenges / projects that you can be a part of.

In all honesty, the stuff you will get to work on in college will make FIRST robots looks like childs play!

Some of the projects Ive seen at RIT in the last few years:

Off-road Go-cart like design and race (international contest)

Autonomous aircraft design contest

Automomous submarine, project that monitors the water quality in lake Ontario

Micro aircraft used by forrest rangers

Micro jet turbine engines

as a matter of fact, FIRST is somewhat of a spin-off of the senior mechanical engineering design contest that Dr Flowers held in his class at MIT - they use to show the contest every year on PBS (seems like a long time ago).